Push-to-talk in danger of over-hypeing its own pudding

IN A REMARKABKLY FRANK speech delivered at the Push-to-Talk World Summit in London, T-Mobile's Carsten Otto confessed that there was a danger that push-to-talk was turning into "another hype like the mobile Internet a few years ago."

T-Mobile has more incentive than any other network operator to look very closely at how it might offer push-to-talk (PTT) facilities since it is the only European operator competing directly against Nextel in the USA.

Otto argued quite forcefully that the perception that Nextel is earning high revenues and enjoys low churn (customer loss) has little to do with PTT and more to do with its business model.

He claims that with Nextel's strong focus on SMEs and business customers, Nextel would be doing just as well without PTT as it is with PTT. He also pointed out that dedicated walkie-talkies sales reach about 10 million units in the USA every year - something which isn't remotely achieved in Europe.

So will PTT really translate into a European phenomenon as everyone predicts, he asks? Carsten Otto took another pot-shot at the widely-held belief that PTT will turn into a consumer-desired facility. "Do I really need PTT for the mountain slopes when I only going skiing once a year," he wondered?

The spooky thing was listening to speakers at the summit argue about the delay experienced when receiving a PTT message. Some speakers said it could be as much as 8 seconds whereas others say it is sub 1 second.

Otto felt it would be more like 2-3 seconds. This sounded exactly the previous discussions over the 'true' speed of GPRS which mysteriously sunk from 117 Kbit/s to around 20 Kbit/s in real life.

Another warning note sounded by Otto concerned launching PTT compatible handsets before the official Push-to-talk standard was finalised -- probably not until Q1 2005. It would, he suggested, lead to users being confused over who was capable of receiving a PTT message and who wasn't. µ

L'INQ
www.iir-conferences.com/pushtotalk